How to access network shares from an elevated process in Windows 7?

"In short, no. There's no supported way to copy the current set of mapped/authenticated network resources from a non-elevated context to your elevated context. For all intents and purposes, they're separate logins that you just happen to be able to interact with from the same console. Being able to communicate between elevated and non-elevated processes would kind of break the whole security purpose of keeping them separated.

However, if these network drives are mounted using the credentials of your user account (and not a separate login/password), you could try just accessing them with the UNC path instead of an actual drive mapping."

"I put together a simple VBScript that maps the drives that are mapped in the current session again for the elevated administrator session. After running the script the mapped drives are available to all elevated processes. This works if the current user already is a local administrator:

Option Explicit
Dim objNetwork, objShell
Dim strDriveLetter, strNetworkPath
Dim colDrives, intDrive, strDrives

If WScript.Arguments.length =0 Then
Set objNetwork = CreateObject(""WScript.Network"")
Set colDrives = objNetwork.EnumNetworkDrives

For intDrive = 0 To (colDrives.Count -1) Step 2
WScript.Echo colDrives.Item(intDrive) & "" is mapped to: "" & colDrives.Item(intDrive + 1)
If Len(strDrives) > 0 Then strDrives = strDrives & "" ""
strDrives = strDrives & "" "" & Chr(34) & colDrives.Item(intDrive) & Chr(34) & "" "" & Chr(34) & colDrives.Item(intDrive + 1) & Chr(34)
Next

If Len(strDrives) > 0 Then
' re-call script with elevation
Set objShell = CreateObject(""Shell.Application"")
objShell.ShellExecute ""cscript.exe"", Chr(34) & WScript.ScriptFullName & Chr(34) & strDrives, """", ""runas"", 1
Else
WScript.Echo ""No drives Mapped.""
End If

Else
' elevated part
Set objNetwork = CreateObject(""WScript.Network"")

For intDrive = 0 To (WScript.Arguments.Count - 1) Step 2
WScript.Echo WScript.Arguments(intDrive) & "" is mapped to: "" & WScript.Arguments(intDrive + 1)
On Error Resume Next ' ignore already mapped drives
objNetwork.MapNetworkDrive WScript.Arguments(intDrive), WScript.Arguments(intDrive + 1)
On Error GoTo 0
Next

End If"